REQUIEM FOR A CITY

Kevin Boyle, one of the great historians of his generation (his book, Arc of Justice, won the National Book Award in 2004), is also a native Detroiter and a true Rustbelt Intellectual. He grew up on Chatsworth Street, on the city's East Side during the 1960s and 1970s, and witnessed the dramatic racial and economic transformations that left Detroit--and so many other cities like it--ravaged by disinvestment.

In this moving article, Boyle revisits his childhood neighborhood where today, you can buy a single-family detached house for about $5,000 more than what his parents paid nearly fifty years ago. Boyle offers a subtle reflection on the intersection between memory and history. It's one of the most powerful, personal meditations on urban change that I have read--and a rare one that evokes childhood memories without slipping into maudlin nostalgia.

THE PITBULL ON THIN ICE

I've never been much of a hockey fan, despite my Midwestern heritage. Everything about hockey is white: the season, the players, the fans, the culture.

When Ed Snider, the owner of the Philadelphia Flyers invited Sarah Palin to drop the first puck at last night's Flyers-Rangers game, Republicans and Democrats alike assumed that this would be a celebratory moment for the Pitbull with Lipstick to rally her Rustbelt white middle-class base.

Instead, the Flyers fans booed. (The Republicans should have known that Philly sports fans are infamously hostile, especially when they smell blood.)

It was a proud moment for this adopted Philadelphian. The pitbull with lipstick has been defanged by her own kind, hockey moms and hockey dads. If the GOP can't win them, their effort to take the White House is on thin ice.

A SHOUT OUT FROM THE POST-RUSTBELT

Loyal readers of Rustbelt Intellectual, I'm still alive but maddeningly busy. It's the time of year when I have a zillion letters of recommendation, several tenure reviews, and lots of other obligations. Throw in two back-to-back conferences, a whole new lecture course to write, and a once-weekly day-and-a-half long trip to Beantown, where I'm teaching a course on urban planning, and my free time gone the way of the industrial economy of Detroit: dwindling fast.

But I do have to put in a few words from Boston. In the early 1970s, Boston ranked up there by every measure as one of the handful of most distressed cities in the United States, right along with Gary, Newark, St. Louis, and Detroit. Boston's manufacturing base had been declining since the 1920s. Its working-class white population was relatively immobile and very turf-conscious. The city was wracked with racial tumult over neighborhood change and especially busing. Its harbor was as polluted as Lake Erie and if it weren't replenished by the tide, it would have probably burned like the Cuyahoga River. To top that off, its housing stock was (and is) pretty lousy. Lots of cheaply built wood frame houses and the vernacular "triple-decker"--one family per floor don't make for a vital urban housing market.

Yet in just a few decades, Boston turned around. Its prominence as an educational center (Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and Boston College, among others) positioned it well to take advantage of the new economy. The universities provided seed money for high tech and biotech industries that lifted it high (other Rustbelt cities rely heavily on meds and eds, but few have such a deep base in research and development). Its old neighborhoods, only partially plundered by urban renewal, appealed to historic preservationists and gentrifiers. And, while Boston was ravaged by racial tensions, it's a much whiter city than many of its northeastern and midwestern counterparts. That has ultimately made it more appealing for commercial investors and real estate developers. Together, all of these factors, along with good infrastructure (especially an excellent public transit system), gave Boston a base for revitalization.

There's one lesson for those who look with despair onto decaying Rustbelt cities. All are not without hope. The ups and downs of metropolitan America cannot be predicted with certainty. If you had asked any well-informed urbanist in 1970 whether Boston would be one of the most prosperous metros in the US in the early 21st century, he or she would have dismissed your question out-of-hand with a sneer.

Off to the airport (not one of the better airports in the US, especially for a city of Boston's importance). But I get to travel underground, through the massively expensive, corruption-riddled, and sometimes dangerous, but still truly fabulous tunnels of the "Big Dig," a reminder that even with unexpected twists and turns, big city construction projects can really work--and can really make a big difference in improving urban life.

SMALL TOWN AMERICA

An oft-repeated theme in this year's election is the virtue of small-town Americans. One of oldest themes in American political and cultural history, the notion that small towns are repositories of all that is good, true, moral, and American continues to resonate. Echoing Richard Nixon's pitch to small-town voters in his "silent majority" campaign (Nixon himself was a product of little Whittier, California), John McCain and Sarah Palin have touted "small town values" on the campaign trail. As Palin stated in her acceptance speech: "'We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity.' I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman. I grew up with those people. They are the ones who do some of the hardest work in America ... who grow our food, run our factories, and fight our wars." (Note to reader: big cities = lazy, consumers not producers, shirkers not workers, naysayers not patriots).

I thought of Palin's speech this morning as I spent an hour walking the streets of Newark, Ohio, the county seat of Licking County, a town of about 47,000 people that has seen better days. Founded in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Newark's architecture reflects its late nineteenth and early twentieth century prosperity. Among the town's real treasures, The Home Building Association, a jewel box of bank (now vacant) built by the great architect Louis Sullivan in 1914.

The Louis Sullivan building is one reminder of how the Republican tribunes of small-town glory have it wrong. They emphasize the virtues of small rather than the virtues of town. The Home Building Association building reflects the cosmopolitan aspirations of small-town America, the attempt to be something greater than itself. Nearly a century ago, Newarkers were proud to imagine themselves as a city.



But life in small-town America today is less. There is an anomie in many of the small towns I have visited in the Midwest and Pennsylvania. These are places that have lost population and jobs, whose downtowns have been gutted by the expansion of Walmarts and suburban shopping centers, and where politics can be narrow and nasty. (The stories of Palin's reign in Wasilla give the lie to the images of small town politics as uplifting). One of the synomyms for small is petty. And there is a pettiness, a parochial localism, in small towns that gets lost in our romantic evocations of Elm Street.

Newark is one of those towns that has been hit hard by the economic downturn. Like many Rustbelt towns, its economy is dependent on manufacturing, but it has been hit badly in recent years. Licking County is not one of Ohio's worst-off areas: its current unemployment rate is 6.6 percent. But you can see the effects of the downturn in the shabby houses along the once-grand Hudson Street just a short walk from downtown. It's the sort of place where the Democrats should find a ready audience among folks burned by declining incomes, the stagnant housing market, rising gas prices, and insecurity.

But Licking County is a solidly Republican place: its voters pulled the lever by large margins for George W. Bush in 2000 and again in 2004. As I walked past the Newark Republican Party headquarters this morning, the McCain/Palin signs dimmed my morning cheer. Their campaign represents the worst of small-town politics: narrowly-defined local interest and the sanctimony of the small. And it doesn't offer much to small-town residents other than a boost of self-esteem that the candidates "know them" and "are one of them." And it doesn't offer much for the Newarks of America, big or small, that are the places left behind in the global economy. It's time to think big.

CAN'T FORGET THE MOTOR CITY

Just a little over four decades ago, as a wee slip of a child, I lived through the Detroit uprising of 1967. Over the course of a week, 43 people were killed (34 of them black, almost all by the police and National Guard), thousands of houses and stores were burned, and more than 7000 people were arrested. I don't remember much, except the sight of National Guard vehicles rolling past my house and the fact that I could not play in my front yard, for fear that I'd be the victim of sniper fire.

The riots were a trauma on the body politic. Many burned-out shopping districts never recovered. Detroit had been steadily losing population and jobs since the 1950s. That hemorrhage continued after the riot--the pattern of economic flight, disinvestment, and population loss was already deeply entrenched. The aftermath of the riots certainly did not improve Detroit's fortunes, though it's historically inaccurate (if compelling narratively) to blame Detroit's woes on that week in late July 1967. But even if Detroiters exaggerate the centrality of the riots in their city's fate, the events of 1967 forever shaped the way that Detroiters and other urbanites talk about their cities.

Our memories of the urban past are inevitably tinged with nostalgia--the product of forgetting as much as recollection. Whenever I visit Detroit, I am struck by the wistful memories that city residents (or more likely former city residents) have about their childhood neighborhoods. White folks invariably see the 1967 Detroit riot as the turning point. Before "they" took over the city and ruined it, Motown was a city of tight-knit neighborhoods, of racial harmony, and tranquility. If only "they" hadn't destroyed Detroit, it would be a thriving metropolis still. The film above, prepared for Detroit's bid for the 1968 Olympics, captures some of the romance of the lost past (though as you watch, recall that Detroit's population was about one-third black when the film was made and further recall that they city had already been devastated by the loss of more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs, mostly in the late 1950s). Whites don't have a monopoly on romantic evocations of the urban past. Black folks also have sepia-toned memories of the segregated city, where neighbors were friendly, where middle-class and working-class people lived side-by-side, and where they all patronized "race" businesses.

Both sets of memories have elements of truth. The city was a safer place 60 years ago than it is today; many neighborhoods (especially compared to their turn-of-the-21st century counterparts) were close-knit. And the cumulative effect of sixty years of disinvestment makes things much, much worse economically then when Detroit was the nation's "Arsenal of Democracy." But the story of decline and memories of a better past simplify and distort the city's history. White neighborhoods were tight in large part because of their racial exclusivity. There wasn't a lot of racial harmony in the postwar city--the city's segregation was the result of a poisonous combination of racist public policy, real estate discrimination, and grassroots organization and often violence by whites who wanted to keep their neighborhoods free of black "invaders." And the "they" who ruined many urban neighborhoods includes lots and lots of white folks--absentee landlords and shopkeepers who let their properties run down, industrialists and business leaders who abandoned the central city, and politicians who aided and abetted white flight. And the black romance with the past overlooks the high rates of poverty that characterized black lives, the ravages of systemic underemployment and unemployment, the dreariness of most black shopping districts, and the fact that most "race" businesses were economically marginal.

Several years ago, ethnographer Phil Kasinitz published a fascinating paper on his interviews with long-time residents of the Brooklyn neighborhood Red Hook. At that time, Red Hook was on the brink of gentrification, as artists and hipsters, priced out of more expensive neighborhoods, began moving into the old tenements and warehouses along the Brooklyn waterfront. But Red Hook was a heterogeneous place, home to a large public housing project, shipyards, storage facilities, and small factories. Many of the neighborhood's older residents were blue-collar workers and stevedores who resented the mostly black residents of the public housing projects and the monied newcomers who opened galleries and coffeehouses.

What Kasinitz found was a huge gap between how white old-timers (the subject of the article) remembered their 'hood (usually romantically--everyone knew each other, people left their doors open at night, the economy was booming) and the reality of their own lives (unemployment and economic insecurity, the lack of public safety, substance abuse, and crime). In other words, people retold the history of their community through the lens of their current reaction to changes going on in the neighborhood.

My childhood memories of racial conflict temper my still rosy-hued recollections of life in my little corner of the city. I saw white racism--even as a child--for what it was. But I still miss the lively street life and the sidewalk camaraderie of my West Side block. It's those two sides of the urban experience--the spirit of community and diversity and the vast political and economic forces arrayed against it--that continue to shape both my scholarship and my choices about where to live, and my politics. I can't forget the Motor City.

RUSTBELT PLACE OF THE WEEK: ATLANTIC CITY

Alright, so I don't love gambling. But here I am in Atlantic City. Amidst the glitter and bling of the casinos, I feel like a teetotaler in a beer garden or a monk in a strip club. I'm more conservative with my money than the most hard-core deficit hawk. The thought of losing my hard-earned cash to the house (inevitable given the odds) makes me jittery with angst. More than that, I find slot machines and their customers depressing. Windowless casinos are dreary places, especially when the sun is bright, the sky is clear, and the temperatures are in their upper seventies and low eighties. But there is something compelling about AC, even if gambling leaves me cold.

AC is close to home (only an hour from Philly and two hours from New York). The restaurants, from hoagies to haute cuisine, are great. And the beaches beckon, even if the occasional soda bottle or condom washes up alongside the hermit crabs and oyster shells. My health-conscious significant other wants to work on her tan for the first time in several years (all those years of 50 spf sunscreen give her the excuse to indulge a little this weekend). We'll ride our bikes on the boardwalk, admire the bronze bodies of summer, listen to some jazz on Chicken Bone Beach, go drinking and dancing, take day trips to Cape May and Sandy Hook, and have a blast on a rare long, kid-free weekend.

Atlantic City is a place of abundant contradictions. It embodies the economic, racial, and cultural schizophrenia of modern America. Its history--as a place of escape and fantasy for blue-collar and middle-class Philadelphians and New Yorkers--is the subject of Boardwalk of Dreams, an extraordinary book by historian and Rustbelt Intellectual fellow traveler Bryant Simon. A witty and learned writer (seldom are the two characteristics found in a single author, especially an academic), Simon powerfully evokes the fantastical and the mundane, and at the same time, decodes the racial and economic realities that make modern AC both unbelievably gritty and super posh. Read Simon, but if in the meantime, if you've never been to AC, you can take a virtual tour of its glitz and grime in this great photo essay at Philly Skyline.



AC is one of the poorest cities in New Jersey, yet home to some of the state's most upscale dining emporiums and fashionable clothing boutiques. Like nearly every city in the Northeast, AC benefited from the real estate boom and saw some new condos and town houses spring forth from its pockmarked landscape of vacant lots. But all the casino revenue in the world can't undo the combined and mutually reinforcing processes of racial segregation and economic marginalization. Atlantic City is a case study in uneven development. Billions have gone into casinos and hotels, yet to shop for groceries or go to a movie requires getting in a car and driving to the dreary, sprawling suburbs on the other side of the bay. Casino dollars have not trickled down to the 'hoods. The public schools are lousy. And Atlantic City is--as it has always been--segregated by race.

It's a place of fantasy and decadence--and for a few days, we'll partake of the unreal life in the city. But outside our massive parking garage, just a short walk away (if anyone here bothered to walk), is a place every bit as real and ruined as North Philadelphia or inner city Detroit or Chicago's South Side.

RUSTBELT PLACE OF THE WEEK: CLEVELAND

Rustbelt urban life is full of juxtapositions, often jarring. The great cities of the Northeast and the Midwest were the boomtowns of the industrial age. Their cityscapes reflect the tremendous capital of the robber barons and industrial titans of a century ago. It's a risk to romanticize the corporate leaders of yore, for the Gilded Age was a time of staggering inequality. Working conditions in turn-of-the-century factories were abysmal. Debilitating industrial accidents were commonplace and, in the era before workers' compensation and insurance, a severed hand or a lost eye meant a lifetime of abject poverty. And urban environments were appalling and degraded because of unregulated industrial pollution. Rivers ran multi-colored with effluvia from factories, coal soot fell like black snow, and city skies were often dark with sulfur-laden pollutants. You can still see the traces of the industrial past on unrenovated limestone and marble buildings, discolored by pollution and often scarred by the effects of years of acid rain. But Robber Barons expressed their vanity by engaging in great civic ventures. Nearly every Rustbelt city, big or small, is chock full of museums, symphony halls, and--especially--libraries, open to the masses but bankrolled by the classes.

Cleveland, my Rustbelt Place of the Week, embodies this history. Its cityscape is littered with abandoned houses, ruined commercial districts, and rotting factory buildings. Like many industrial cities, it laid waste to much of its waterfront. The Cuyahoga River, so polluted that it once caught on fire, was the butt end of Cleveland's industry. Large stretches of the Cuyahoga, between the semi-gentrified Flats downtown, and the parkland south of the city, are still ruined by decades of industrial neglect. And the Lake Erie shorefront from downtown several miles eastward, is mess of highway, industrial and commercial land (much of it unused), and a little-trafficked airport. The disinvestment that has ravaged most Rustbelt cities has left its mark on Cleveland's downtown, though some of the fine nineteenth century, buildings once home to warehouses and factories, has been converted into apartments and restaurants. Still, it is striking, coming from the East Coast, at how little retail exists in downtown Cleveland. Other than the Tower Center (which has had a troubled recent past) it's damn nigh impossible to shop downtown.

Still, Cleveland is a beautiful city--one that does not deserve its long time moniker, "the mistake by the lake." It's West Side Market (pictured above) is one of the great urban markets in America. Last fall, I had a fabulous bratwurst sandwich from a little stall there, before heading over to the nearby Great Lakes Brewery to wash it down with a locally-brewed ale. Cleveland has some quirky and characterful neighborhoods. Just south of downtown is the Slavic Village, a neighborhood that is a hodgepodge of worker-built homes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And the jewel of Cleveland is the cultural district around Case Western Reserve University, home to all of the institutions built and richly endowed by Cleveland's once mighty upper class. There is enough cultural vitality in that part of Cleveland to support a lively Cinemateque, a weekly gathering of cineastes who can watch classic, obscure, and recent films that would never, never make it into a suburban multiplex. And Cleveland is home to one of the most robust movements for community economic development--a fact visible in the new housing and rehabilitation in many of its working-class neighborhoods.

Cleveland has more than its share of problems: chronic crime, deteriorating schools, housing abandonment, an inadequate tax base, and a deep and still-unresolved history of racial segregation. Yet, like all troubled cities, a visitor can find there too the signs of a great past, a vital present, and maybe, just maybe a more promising future.

GET REAL: MOVE TO HYDE PARK

Several times a year, early and often as the machine pols would say, I make my way to Chicago. The Windy City is an incomparable place, home to some of America's greatest architecture--including Frank Lloyd Wright's most important houses and the exquisite Monadnock Building, an early skyscraper built with load-bearing masonry walls. Chicago is also one of America's most diverse cities: it has a white minority, a large African American population still concentrated in some of America's most segregated neighborhoods, a rapidly-growing Hispanic population--mainly Mexican--and sizable enclaves of immigrants from South and East Asia. Chicago is a gritty place, despite the glitz of the Loop, the Miracle Mile, and the luxury apartments of Lakeshore Drive. Its economy was ravaged by deindustrialization and the remnants of its once-mighty past as the workshop of the world can be found hulking over the South and West Sides. Chicago has staggeringly high rates of poverty and unemployment, especially among its African American population. It's a city that embodies the contradictions at the heart of modern American society: wrenching poverty amidst great wealth, racial segregation and extraordinary diversity, disinvestment and conspicuous consumption.

The Windy City--or a little section of it--is the subject of a cloying article in the current Weekly Standard. Andrew Ferguson jetted into Chicago to visit Barack Obama's neighborhood, Hyde Park, assiduously gathering material to offer another version of the tired but endlessly recycled conservative argument that the Democratic presidential candidate is an out-of-touch elitist. In Ferguson's telling, Hyde Park is a weird place peopled by an "alarmingly high number of men wandering about looking like NPR announcers--the wispy beards and wire rims, the pressed jeans and unscuffed sneakers, the backpacks and the bikes." (I don't know many NPR announcers, but my guess is that there isn't a dress code there. And who wears pressed jeans?) "The place seems unrooted," continues Ferguson, in a stream of blather that I won't keep quoting.

Although Hyde Park is one of the few racially diverse neighborhoods in the country, Ferguson finds even that problematic. Ferguson substitutes coffee shop ethnography for real research and points out that: "It's not often noted that the neighborhood's diversity has its limits. 'In Hyde Park,' a resident told me, '"integration" means white people and black people." The nation's fastest growing ethnic group, Hispanics, is scarcely represented at all; same for Asians." Rustbelt Intellectual Standard Warning No. 1: Andrew, data is not the sum of anecdote. Hyde Park, as one of its more rigorous social scientists and sharp-tongued bloggers reminds us, has a sizable Asian population and some Hispanic residents. It's also class heterogeneous in a way that most American neighborhoods are not.

To highlight Hyde Park's "isolation," Ferguson drives the half hour from Obama's "mansion" to Trinity UCC, Obama's former church, which is in a blue-collar, African American neighborhood--to Ferguson further evidence of Obama's out-of-touch lifestyle. Should Obama be living in a little, rundown bungalow instead of Hyde Park? Then, somehow, he would be one of the people.

In his prattle about Hyde Park's "isolation," Ferguson misses a very important point. Hyde Park is a distinctive place that contrasts with the surrounding, mostly poor and working-class black neighborhoods that dominate Chicago's South Side. But Hyde Parkers, unlike residents of America's truly isolated suburban communities, are part of a polity that is economically, socially, racially, and ethnically diverse. They pay their taxes to Chicago--rather than skipping across city lines and, in the process, avoiding responsibility for the city, its poor and elderly populations, and the social services that they require. They are called to serve on juries whose composition reflects, to some extent at least, the diversity of their city. In other words, Hyde Parkers are not in the slightest bit isolated politically.

The real elitists are people like John and Cindy McCain who live in a $4.72 million luxury condo in Phoenix. Or George W. Bush, who pretends to be 'jes folks, but lived in lily white, upscale Highland Park, Texas before he made it to the White House and spends his spare time at the "Western White House," usually described as a humble ranch, but which includes two 4000 square foot houses, one custom built for the Bushes, a large swimming pool and more--all on a property of more than 1100 acres. Bush is still a member of the posh Highland Park Methodist Church, in one of Dallas' richest suburbs. He doesn't see little bungalows on his way to worship. His God dwells in the land where yes, the camel and the rich man can both find their way through the eye of the needle and make it to heaven. McCain and Bush are the true, out of touch elitists. To them: get real: move to Hyde Park.